Album of the Day for the past week took on a distinctly death metal flavour as the week went on, but there’s still plenty of variety to be found, with as much emotional heaviness and there is musical. Enjoy!

Whilst the Album of the Day feature is now a social-media based feature, I figured it would be useful to have a post at the end of each week recapping the previous selections for the week gone by, all in one convenient place. So, here’s this week’s selections:

The self-titled debut album from Wode was good, if maybe a little too in thrall of its influences. The follow-up, 2017’s Servants of the Countercosmos, was an improvement in practically every way possible. The sense of grandeur is still there, but a sense of celestial violence and other-worldly disdain was much more to the fore, as if channeling the spirits of Dissection, Deathspell Omega, and English heritage black metal in to some demonic form. It also contains the catchiest song the band have written to date, a greater sense of variety, and the kind of charisma that could see the band go far.

I think by this stage, it’s safe to say that we’re living through a golden age of underground death metal. Consideration the quality of bands like Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, Chthe’ilist, Ritual Necromancy, Of Feather and Bone, Necrot, Undergang, Our Place of Worship is Silence – and so many others! Any such list should surely also include Tomb Mold, as their latest album, Manor of Indefinite Forms, is another highlight for death metal in an era that is stuffed full of them. Dirty, dark, and irresistibly heavy, full of incredible riffs, this is something special.

I confess, somewhere along the line, I lost my faith in later-day Sepultura. I have soft spots for Against and Nation, but from Roorback onwards, nothing had grabbed me. It’s not that they’re not the same band as Max-era Sepultura – they might as well be different entities completely now – and I’m longing for the old days. It’s just that the albums weren’t that, well, good. So, imagine my surprise when Machine Messiah didn’t so much change that streak as it did grab me, shake me around, and realise just how great their prog/thrash/groove combination can be. Their best album since Chaos A.D? As far as I’m concerned, yes.